1991

I let the door crash behind me. It’s a dank October. I head towards the shops for the pint of milk that I have suddenly realised I need.

The streets are busy – it’s a Saturday. I cross over the noisy main road with its cars and lorries and reach the film house where they show the latest foreign releases and arty classics. A poster above shows that they are currently showing a film about Mishima, a Japanese man whose suicide and temper made him infamous; the man voted by many women to have been the worst husband imaginable. On the steps there slouches a man who has pissed himself. Various rings of dried fluids are on the front of his trousers and a cup is in his hand which he uses to harangue passers-by into handing him coins. His face bleeds.

I move swiftly on and watch him with interest from a group of benches nearby. Beside me are seven or eight young girls, all dressed precociously, all with inexpert make-up and jewellery that suggests prostitution rather than availability. They sit in rapt wonder at another who puts on the exaggerated vocal and facial mannerisms of shock and surprise she no doubt learned from her mother, and who no doubt learned it from hers. The girl tells the others about what it’s like to engage in fellatio. Her descriptions are fantastical, lurid and hopelessly inaccurate. Some others offer their equally absurd suggestions and experiences. None of these girls is over ten years old.

I leave and stand in the queue for the supermarket where I see three drunken youths attack the security guard who was trying to apprehend another for stealing drink from the shelves. A shop assistant reaches for the phone and is punched to the ground. I leave again.

I retrace my steps and drop my milk money into the beggar’s cup. As I do so, I see the face of Mishima again and realize that his suicide was not the act of a desperate man, but that of a man who can’t stand to be part of the same species as the rest of us. I hear him say ‘what has this place for me?’. I fully understand him. On days like this he seems like a most reasonable man.